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Bloom
My entry for the inaugural Jammin 2019 Game Jam
In August 2019, I participated in the very first Jammin Game Jam. The jam was hosted by Trinidadian game developer gameboymarcus and it required you to make a game based on the theme “Growth”. I decided to enter primarily to show my support for local game development in Trinidad and to see what other local developers were doing in this space.
The Ideation Process
“Growth” was a pretty challenging theme for me. I spent a good chunk of time trying to find an idea for a game that would pair well with the theme. Eventually, I settled on the idea of making flowers grow or bloom. What’s required for that to happen? Well, what if the player’s character was a butterfly that needed to flit onto plants to make their flowers bloom? It isn’t technically accurate, but it’s good enough to telegraph the gameplay. I figured this idea would fit nicely into a puzzle-style game, but it still needed some sort of core mechanic that would be able to hook the player.
I did a bunch of research into puzzle games to see what kind of mechanics might apply to this game. One that I came across was the ability to draw a simple path for the player to follow and the player will then continuously repeat the path while moving toward the goal. I liked this mechanic because it provided a novel way of moving the player and inherently was puzzle-y in nature. I could setup scenarios for the player to navigate through, requiring them to draw a path and have the character repeat that path to bloom all of the flowers.
The Build
Once the idea was solid enough, I set about building the core functionality using Phaser. The most important part to get working was the ability to draw a path. I looked into various ways to handle drawing paths in Phaser and eventually settled on an approach that produced a smooth, continuous path. The drawing method also needed to support both mouse and touch inputs, which Phaser handled natively.
When that was working, I moved on to figuring out how to get the character to follow the path that was drawn. The player would be drawing his paths in a dedicated canvas area that was separated from the area where the character would be moving around. I mapped the coordinates of the drawn path onto the character’s play area and added the functionality to make the character repeat the path continuously.
With the core gameplay working, I added in the points that the character needed to hit in order to make flowers bloom. For the actual flowers themselves, I wanted a bouquet of randomly generated flowers to bloom and look different every time. I achieved this by generating a random dispersion of points around the area that the character hit and having a random selection of flower sprites scale up from those points. This ended up looking quite nice for a bloom effect.
Once all of the core mechanics were in place, I started working on the levels that the player would have to navigate through. I added some enemies that caused the player to lose when they were hit; some of them static and some moved along a fixed path. For this game, I handcrafted around 10 levels in time for the jam, but if it were ever to be expanded into a real product, making new levels was fairly simple.
The final step was to add a bit of polish like making the player-drawn path multi-coloured, adding animations to the player’s butterfly, and, of course, adding music and sound effects. I also fleshed out the title screen and main menu as well as handled saving the player’s progress. I also made an in-game tutorial out of the first few levels to explain how to use the mechanic. You can click here to see a video of the final prototype.
The Result
The finished game turned out pretty well. It was fun to play and had some fairly difficult puzzles. In fact, the difficulty may have ramped up too quickly after the tutorial, as pointed out by the game jam judges. Speaking of the jam, Bloom went on to win 1st place at Jammin 2019. There were only 2 entries, but based on the reviews, I still felt like it was a quality game that people enjoyed. You can play Bloom on itch.io for free here. Have fun!
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